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SARS Mysterious Origins
Hamper Efforts for Cure

By

Mark Ingebretsen

Updated May 6, 2003 12:01 a.m. ET

After successfully deciphering its genome, researchers know how the virus thought to cause severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, is constructed. Now they face another perhaps more daunting question: Where did the virus come from?

Understanding the origins of the SARS virus could help researchers better understand how it behaves and ultimately how to destroy it. Yet scientists involved in sequencing the SARS genome reported their completed project "yielded practically no clues about where it came from or why it infects...